I'm pulling from my experiences over at WoWInterface for the ESO crowd, after responding to a thread there about running Minion in Wine.

It's not a simple process, but if you're playing ESO or WoW on Linux already, I imagine you're a little bit used to fiddling with things in Linux.

Prereqs:

1. You need a working Sun Java JRE7. JRE8 has an incompatibility which will cause a crash when loading Minion. In addition, OpenJDK may not package the required JavaFX library on your distro. Mine didn't!

2. You need Wine, to work around another crash caused by the game detection script that tries to run when you first lauch Minion. You probably already have it, considering.

Process:

1. We first need a 'working' version of Minion that we'll run to generate the minion.xml settings file. We need this file to bypass the game detection script which will hang Minion running with native Java.

- Create a wineprefix of your choice - I suggest a recent 1.7.x 32 bit. It may help to winetricks the dx9 libraries.
- Download and install the current Windows Minion installer for your 32/64 bit wine.
- Run Minion in wine. It will have some graphical glitches, but it should work. Let it run the game autodetect - which probably won't find anything as nothing is installed to an 'expected' Windows or OSX location.
- Manually browse to your ESO/WoW AddOns folders and let minion correctly recognize your AddOns. Close minion.

2. We now want to grab the minion jar file out of the wine prefix to create our own native java executable.

- Navigate into your wineprefix; Minion should have installed in c_drive/users/yourusername/Local Settings/Application Data/Minion
- Enter the app folder there and copy the Minion-jfx.jar - and possibly the lib folder. You can also copy the icon file from the root Minion folder and convert that into an icon format Linux recognizes. If you want an icon in your app shortcut...
- Paste this to whatever folder you want to keep Minion in your home user folder. I have mine under ~/Programs/Minion/.

3. Now we need to run Minion with our JRE 7.
- Create an application shortcut with your Java RE 7 and link it to Minion:
/usr/bin/java -jar /home/myname/Programs/Minion/Minion-jfx.jar

4. Now launch Minion. It will crash when it tries to find existing games, but we might as well let it generate our settings file. Close it out after it gets stuck on the game detection box.

5. We need to copy our wine minion.xml file to our linux home directory, letting it skip this check.
- Navigate to your wineprefix drive_c/users/yourname/.minion and copy the minion.xml
- Navigate to your home ~/.minion directory and overwrite the minion.xml there

6. Now we need to let minion run. It will fail one more time, but it will clean out the bad paths in the copied config file. Close it when it stops working.

7. Finally, launch minion one more time. It should now be functional, allowing you to add ESO/WoW to your game list and install/update AddOns!

NOTE: There is still one hairy bug at this stage, which is a nuisance more than anything - at least on my machine. There's a sort of 'ghost window' effect where the mouse can only interact with Minion's window and random locations. Half the time it will click through to whatever is behind it. Half the time it will correctly select what the mouse is over. Most parts of the UI will highlight when the mouse is correctly 'on' them, so use that as a guide.

Last edited by Silarn : 09/08/14 at 05:34 PM.
Reason: Clarify as how-to

It seems that the Sun Java JRE7 and JRE8 files are no longer available. This was due to (I think) license changes by Sun, and their putting the downloads behind a subscriber-only firewall. It also seems the OpenJRE and JDK versions currently available do not work with the Java Minion app. The unfortunate affect to this is there no longer seems to be a way to make the Java version of Minion work, at least not the way described here.

I put this here to help someone like me avoid wasting time on things that no longer work. On the other hand, I'm still looking for alternatives, though. Now that ESO runs *very well* on Steam Play with Proton, I play all games exclusively on Linux. Manually updating my ESO addons certainly works, but definitely isn't convenient, either.

Before you start minion we need to apply the patch manually. Navigate to the folder you are running minion from and you should see a new folder named "null" grab the Minion-jfx.jar from there and copy over the old Minion-jfx.jar in the parent directory.

now start minion again java -jar Minion-jfx.jar and it should work like mine...

So I actually used Lutris and installed Minion in the same prefix as ESO (after installing ESO via Lutris). The process was slick!

Install Minion Addon Manager within Lutris ESO
======================================================
1. Download the Minion executable for Windows
2. Add game inn Lutris:
1. Click the '+' to add a game
Game info tab:
Name: Lutris
Runner: Wine (runs windows games)
Game options
executable: (leave blank for now)
Wine prefix: (Select browse and navigate to your folder than contains c_drive for ESO)
** If you use Lutris to install ESO it is ~/Games/the-elder-scrolls-online-tamriel-unlimited
2. Select Save
3. In the main Lutris screen, select the new Minion game and select 'Run EXE inside wine prefix'
4. Navigate to the downloaded Minion installer EXE and run it. Go through all the installation.

Now that the game is installed we need to set the executable to run from the newly installed exe inside the prefix that has ESO
The default Minion directory for reference are as follows:

From the prefix (I left out escaping spaces for readability):
drive_c/users/(your user)/Local Settings/Application Data/Minion/Minion.exe

So for me, the absolute path from my user in Linux:
~/Games/the-elder-scrolls-online-tamriel-unlimited/drive_c/users/tannercrook/Local\ Settings/Application\ Data/Minion/Minion.exe

5. Click Minion in Lutris and select the settings button
6. In the Game info tab, click the smaller image box and navigate to the same directory as the Minion.exe as above but choose the Minion icon.
7. Go to the Game options tab
8. Browse to the executable to the Minion.exe as specified above
9. Hit save
10. Launch and enjoy!!!!

Your Addon folder is located at My Documents/Elder Scrolls Online/live/AddOns